Friday, June 19, 2015

In 1973, A.O. Hirschman, with his characteristic, concealing
modesty (it covered up the fact that he was touching on big themes that
economists liked to avoid), wrote an essay about envy and the egalitarian
impulse in developing economies. For two decades, Hirschman had been at work as
an economist and policy maker dealing with foreign aid and plans to elevate the
poorer national economies into the league of the developed nations, as they
were called back then. This was the era of multi-year plans and the fad for
shrinking agriculture and favoring export industries, which often,
paradoxically, called for putting barriers on imports. All of this, by now, has
been swept away by the Washington Consensus and the aggressive syndicate of
international institutions, multinationals, and neo-liberals.

In Hirschman’s time, third world countries were experiencing
unprecedented growth. He observed that the profit from that growth largely
accrued to the wealthy. What puzzled him was that this did not stimulate the
kind of envy that was feared by the anti-communist establishment everywhere.
Instead of revolution, for the most part, third world populations seemed
patiently to be waiting. Hirschman devised a model to capture what one might
call the dynamics of social envy. In this model, growth and the enrichment of
the richest was tolerable as long as the larger population believed that the
growth would eventually make themselves and their children richer. In other
words, Hirschman believed that there was a larger tolerance for inequality than
was reckoned with by the leftist agitator. This was puzzling if one took into
account the work of George Foster, whose studies of peasant society in Mexico
convinced him that traditional society is penetrated by what he called the “image
of the limited good”. This means that the peasant views goods in terms of a
zero-sum game, in which x’s possessions are viewed by y from the standpoint of
scarcity – what x possesses, y does not possess. Like people in a lifeboat with
limited rations, a careful watch is placed on the village populaton to make
visible who has what. This is a situation in which savings is hidden, rather
than invested.

What Foster calls the limited good, I would call nemesis. In
my opinion, the great effect of the enlightenment and of the growing economies
of the 19th century was to suppress nemesis – the social and human
limit which demands respect in societies in which growth is sporadic and
subject to decay. In such societies, time is cyclical; the myth of progress has
no footing here.

I think Hirschman was right to tackle the theme of envy, but
his model, it seems to me, lacks an important feature that one finds in success
societies – societies, that is, where an ethos of success replaces the ethos of
sacrifice. In the former, envy inevitably increases as the success of the
wealthiest creates a larger and larger positional gap between the top and the
rest. Here, however, an interesting, unconscious mechanism intervenes to protect
the wealthiest. This mechanism inverts the direction of envy, the direction of
the evil eye. Instead of the wealthiest being subject to the violence of envy,
the poorest are subject to it.

This inversion of envy at first seems incredible. How could
the poorest be an object of envy? However, anyone with ears to hear in America’s
dining and living rooms, or in American work places, will here the tale of the
high living poor. The poor don’t work. They luxuriate on welfare payments. The
government only works for the poor. The Great slump was caused by the poor
cheating the naïve banks who were forced by the government to give them
mortgages they couldn’t pay. This story and variations of it are told over and
over. We sometimes wonder over some savage custom, thinking, how could it be
believed that, say, a woman who has a miscarriage causes drought – one of the
thousands of such beliefs recorded in the Golden Bough? But the inversion of
envy in success societies, the most pure of which is the US, should teach us
that the unlikelihood of a belief, its grossly ridiculous nature when laid out
in cold logic, is no bar to its being held true. Although newspaper
sociologists like to insist on the hopeful, aspirational beliefs of Americans
as the sort of national glue that keeps down radicalism, I would say that, more
powerfully, it is the inverted envy, its manipulation and thousand and one uses
(inverted envy is deeply associated with racism in America, for instance) that
makes it very hard to achieve any kind of lasting social justice in the US

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

In a bout of dubious scientific romanticism, Quine, in Word
and Object, conjures up the beginning of language learning by positing an
extra-linguistic anchor, a physical stimulus, to get us over the bridge from
babble to the noun. Quine’s piece on the baby learning the word Mama takes the
then fashionable behavioralism of Skinner and embeds it into theory of the
onto-genesis of language:

“The
operant act may be the random babbling of some thing like 'Mama' at some moment
when, by coincidence, the mother's face is looming. The mother, pleased at
being named, rewards this random act, and so in the future the ap­proach of the
mother's face suc­ceeds as a stimulus for further utterances of 'Mama'. The
child has learned an occasion sen­tence.”

Coincidence
plays a hinge role here. The presentation of Mama’s face –its looming – makes this
a bit more primitive than Mama pointing at her face, but the logic is the same:
there is the extra-linguistic world, the presentation, the coincidence with
utterance, and the occasion sentence. The set up here has been remarkably
consistent in Western philosophy of language since Augustine’s De Magistro, in
which Augustine instructs his illegitimate son on the semiotic constitution of
language – words as signs – by reference to charades, the language of gesture
of the deaf, mime, and mostly, the pointing finger. Adeodatus accepts the
significance of signs, but then gets stuck on what we would call the social
construction of reality: how does one ever get out of the world of signs?

Adeodatus:
But even a wall, as our reasoning shoedd, cannot be shown without a pointing
finger. The holding out of the finger is not the wall but the sign by means of
which the wall is pointed out. So far as I can see there is nothing which can
be shown without signs/

Augustine:
Suppose I were to ask you what walking is, and you were to get up and do it, wouldn’t
you be using the thing itself to show me, not words or any other signs?

Adeodatus:
Yes, of course. I am ashamed that I did
not notice so obvious a fact.”

Adeodatus
concedes, of course, too quickly, since it is not clear why you can’t use the
thing in itself as a sign, just as it is unclear why Mama’s face is the thing
in itself, and not already the sign, this is Mama.

Signs
are a labyrinth. We are continually promised that the labyrinth has an exit,
but we are continually deflected from its discovery once we’ve made our fatal
entrance.

However,
though the metaphysical divide between the word and the object in Quine is
definitely arguable, Quine does, properly, take up the issue of divided
reference as an issue that cannot be delayed until language is learned.

Another
word for divided reference is wise-assery. The smart aleck, the wise ass, the
joker – from my earliest memories, I was always like that. And I am amazed and
pleased, most of the time, that Adam is also a mocker.

A
couple of nights ago, Adam made up his first pun, when we showed him how to
roll spagetti on a fork and he pronounced it a pasta-fier.

As
well, he has found out how much fun it is to imitate himself. Sometimes, he
will pretend cry and pretend tantrum for the fun of it. To, as Quine would put
it, stress the context of stimulation in which he has been placed. Or, as I
would put it, to both entertain and tease his parental units.

Teasing
stretches a long way. It is rooted in the animal world – not only among humans,
but among other social animals – and it goes all the way into literature, which
is, at base, simply a long form of teasing. There are writers who must have
been aggressive teasers when they were young – like Nabokov – and others who
were, perhaps, more ambiguous about the phenomenon – like Kafka. Teasing isn’t
a necessary derivative of sign using – I’m not sure anyone has ever caught an
ant or a bee teasing, although perhaps we have just not looked hard enough –
but sign using is certainly a prerequisite of teasing. I’m learning to enjoy
this all over again with Adam.

Although
… to give Augustine and Quine their due, when it comes to distinguishing the sign from the thing, Adam
seems more in their camp. Thus, when I ask Adam, once he has jumped up and down
and laughed while seeing a superhero, if Adam is a superhero, he will
invariably reply, no, Adam is Adam. Adam is always Adam. At least for now, he’s
having no truck with deconstruction.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.